DISPATCHES SEPTEMBER
Mountain at my gates
I like to binge. Be it a podcast, Netflix series or a game, I like to immerse myself completely in fictional worlds – and to do that, there has to be something to hook me. With a series, it has to be a premise. With a podcast, it has to be about something I know nothing about. But with games, it is something different. Some games are seductive in a way they give you little dopamine bumps, like your guns in Borderlands or Destiny getting stronger. Some games reward your intelligence, your ability to solve a problem, and others just give you the thrill of the win. A few rare games absorb you totally, like Breath Of The Wild, which call you back because of the thrill of discovery. Yet very few games (or books or series) really nail the thrill of adversity, which brings me to the game I actually want to talk about, and that is Elden Ring.
I finished it this weekend after two solid months of play, and as the credits rolled, I sat there trying to process what I had played. At 42, I had wondered if my hands still had the dexterity. I basically completed it in its entirety with the first semi-decent sword I found (Bloodhound’s Fang). I only touched magic in the very late game, the rest of it spent as a melee tank, with my mimic bro messing up fools. This is how I have beaten every Soulslike. But unlike Dark Souls, where I had to sometimes farm if I hit a wall, in Elden Ring
I just went and did something else. I’d come back a few hours, a few levels and an upgraded weapon later, and that problem became a victory. Miyazaki himself has said that if you don’t have pain or adversity, then how can you feel the joy of overcoming it?
I think that is the driving animus of Elden Ring, and also why so many people are pushing through to the end. In fact, I don’t really think people care that much about the story or plot – it is secondary to the stories you tell about Shades hiding in the shadows of tombs, bats that attacked you because you chased after a beetle, or wolves that fell from the sky. The elevator ride to Siofra River. The path you followed that took you to an area you could have easily missed.
I don’t know what I will play next. Part of me thinks it can’t be a narrative game because I no longer care for games that are excuses for massive cutscenes. None of those will elicit the same emotional response as I had when I beat Margit, let alone the rune bear in a bloody cave, or that Crucible Knight near the aqueduct. The point I want to make is that the difficult bosses weren’t that way because of massive HP pools, but because of how they moved, and how they challenged you. FromSoftware games teach you that to panic is to die. Weirdly, I rarely felt as calm as I did playing Elden Ring – for me, it was strangely meditative. I may switch to something like Loop Hero or Vampire Survivors, or I may just step away from gaming for a bit. Because where do you go after The Lands Between? Anand Modha
“I may just step away for a bit. Because where do you go after The Lands Between?”
In degrees
As much as I might get hooked by a TV series or glued to a book, no medium compels me quite like videogames. Recently, I’ve been using any spare moment to dive into Dungeon Encounters on Switch and losing long evenings to Elden Ring. Both games are utterly compelling, but they offer quite different flavours of obsession, which has got me thinking.
One approach is ‘numbers going up’. Even now, I’m thinking about what floor I will reach on my next descent in Dungeon Encounters, how much I can level up, and what that will mean for doling out evergreater damage. That’s a simple yet very
satisfying gameplay loop right there. A lot of thirdperson, open-world action games include similar reward systems: lists of quests to mark ‘complete’, and maps to methodically clear of icons. But, as we all know by now, a certain thirdperson, openworld action game eschews this technique.
Returning time and again to the Lands Between, my thirst for defeat seemingly unquenched, I wonder: what is it that compels me so strongly? It’s certainly not the thrill of pushing my R Armament 2 from 167 to 168, and if I want to tick off quests then I have to write them down in the first place. Elden Ring asks you to rise up and meet it, all the while clutching some beautiful ornament just out of your reach. Much is demanded of my Tarnished and me. We suffer tricks and curses and often face overwhelming odds, unsure how we will be rewarded – and yet I am compelled to push onwards. With subtle guidance, I invest more heavily in our emerging epic. Thus, my gameplay story becomes self-satisfying.
I don’t dislike numbers-going-up, and it can be just as great an achievement (all hail Dungeon Encounters), but a game has to be more than its player-retention mechanics. A recent Triple Click podcast discussed how the streamlined loot-hoovering of Diablo Immortal can actually disengage players. There, the compulsive element is so simple that it doesn’t require much investment but simultaneously is so prominent as to dwarf the rest of the experience. Rather than encouraging you to dig deeper, it reveals more cynical manipulation.
I may love all my personal obsessions, but I admire the subtle ones. If Dungeon Encounters is the dealer giving free hits to keep you coming back, Elden Ring is the will-o-wisp, luring you into the land of faerie with its ghostly light.
Ben Jackson
We’d question your assertion that Dungeon Encounters is nothing more than ‘numbers going up’ (the stories those integers tell!), but allow us to gift you 12 months of Edge while you figure out your next obsession.
What remains
Some time ago, I was near the end of Genesis Noir on my Xbox when it crashed at the same bit for a fourth time and I gave up and went on YouTube to see how the game ended. While I was watching, I had this horrible feeling come over me that after all these years of thinking of myself as a gamer, maybe all I enjoyed really was interactive entertainment, particularly since virtually all the games that have had the greatest impact on me over the last few years are varying degrees of so-called walking simulators. I’d been in this mindset until I read Jon Bailes’‘Wanderlust’ article
(E370), which read like a love letter to all those games that give me goosebumps, and actually felt good about them and myself as a gamer. And then I read Lee Hyde’s letter in E372 and am now gnawed up with self-doubt again.
I get Lee’s argument that things described as a game without a fail state might be pushing it, but then reading Steven Poole’s piece (E372) on the arbitrary win and fail states of the FT’s climate change game, a fail state that uses crude, obvious mechanics feels probably worse to me than a game that doesn’t have them at all. Fail states are binary by their very nature, which, returning to Lee’s film analogy, all feels very Hollywood. Maybe games without fail states are more about those shades of grey that you might find in indie movies – where sometimes just being, and experiencing that being, is the point.
Thinking back to watching Genesis Noir rather than playing, it did feel like a much inferior experience, even if my ability to change anything when playing was limited. Basically, I still have no idea if they count as games or not, but I still very much feel more part of the gaming community than any other tribe – if they’ll have me, of course.
Mark Whitfield
Mark, you’re welcome here any time. Well, maybe not Wednesdays at 9pm. (Don’t ask.)
Total life forever
Robert’s characteristically thoughtful letter in
E373 notes that, as a concept, “a game must have a fail state”, even if the medium of games includes activities without fail states. I hope Robert (and Salen and Zimmerman, from whom he borrows the definition) will forgive me for disagreeing.
Take peek-a-boo. It’s a classic game without a fail state. Not hiding or emerging don’t count as fail states but a failure to play altogether. There are other classic games that don’t have fail states, like Would You Rather. Admittedly, it’s not easy to think of noncontroversial examples, but the point is that they do seem to exist.
One might argue that the likes of peek-aboo and Would You Rather aren’t really games but activities. However, I’m not sure it would stand up from the point of view of ordinary language – games are played and we happily say things like, “I played peek-a-boo with Alice”. The definition of games in terms of fail states seems to prescribe a concept rather than describe the concept we actually use.
So how should we understand the concept of games that we actually use? I think the clue is in the peek-a-boo example. Failure to hide or emerge is failure to play peek-a-boo. More generally, failure to follow the rules of a game is failure to play that game. So I suggest that games are just rule-bound activities.
That does draw the concept of games incredibly widely – never mind Dear Esther or Firewatch, it includes anything from voting to holding a conversation. Personally I think I’m OK with that; certainly Wittgenstein’s notion of language games is on my side here. Plus, imagine the boost to subscribers if we agreed that life is a game and Edge covers all the important games on a monthly basis…
Leo Tarasov
Sounds like a plan. In next issue’s extended Play section we’ll run the rule over Renewing Your Car Insurance, Putting The Bins Out, and of course that potential cult favourite, Wondering If The Font Server Is Down Again.